I think Randall is trying to say that they are having a baby. I started to think that with the Bonding comic where a parent and child were playing catch. Now I think that more because the female laid down (sick) Male stuck his toe in the water (move in together), then they built a sand castle (got married) They separate and the female begins creating something by herself (pregnant).

What could have been achieved with that brain power? And we aren't talking about just ordinary brains, but BRAINS!

If Randall ever learns to not just bind tons of mental nerd power but to channel it elsewhere, he would be a very dangerous man. Even more dangerous than <insert your favourite James Bond villain here>.

Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Chan-Chu. But I think it's Colin -- Tim Vine

Randall is a _____ing genius. I don't know if I'm more impressed by his ability to make the internets move to his time or my just-now discovery of Umwelt's true nature. Guess I'm on of the animals living happily in its own universe 'cos I just thought "huh, didn't think Randall was from the midwest..." laughed, moved on.

And now I'm on a 19 page topic with 150000 views in a little over a day watching black pixels pile up... but Randall is just exploring and enjoying the search for the limits of a medium; continually proving our limits have always been inside our own minds

edit: # of views wildly inaccurate after being pulled from my ass, returned with number pulled from reality

I was also worried at first that this comic, coupled with the other recent comic oddities, pointed towards some major life change, but this now seems more and more to me like a “regular” xkcd comic – that is, consistent with theme and style of Randall’s other comics. Maybe there was/is some major life event that correlates to the theme of time – like the death of a parent, or starting a family, or a quarter life crisis, or whatever – but isn’t all art translating life into, well, art? In that way his experience has shaped this comic, whether it be in direct relation to an actual event, or just the cumulative rumination on the subject of time, or something else. He’s making a piece of art, in this form, which is both the antithesis of comic 1110’s freedom and a corollary to it – the idea that while life and time are vast (like both comics, in different ways) it is only experienced one moment at a time. In that way the comic is very much just a description – Time, this is what it actually is – a bunch of moments strung together. Maybe the recent comics have been late and short because he’s been spending time making this happen! Maybe they’re unrelated. Perhaps his intention is little more than making a very cool comic with some fun coding – but as with all good art, the each of us gets something different out of it, colored by our own experience, bias, neurosis, etc. as is obviously happening here.

“Wait for it” strikes me as a prep – ala many online videos with delayed punclines, as well as a little in-joke on that convention – “Wait for it...”…Also, seriously, you just have to effing wait for it.

Regardless of the intent or the ending or anything else, I bet he’s had a lot of fun doing this, and he’s earned his accolades today – I’m thoroughly entertained, intrigued, amazed!

What could have been achieved with that brain power? And we aren't talking about just ordinary brains, but BRAINS!

If Randall ever learns to not just bind tons of mental nerd power but to channel it elsewhere, he would be a very dangerous man. Even more dangerous than <insert your favourite James Bond villain here>.

Mass Nerd Sniping is not a toy. Kids, don't try it at home.

I registered just to reply to your post. I've read every post in this thread, and I've been staring at the comic every half hour now since I first checked the comic yesterday. I'm a rather obsessive person, and the constant updates have left me unable to sleep. I MUST see the new comic every half hour, or else I feel a panic.

I don't feel as if I'd be able to contribute anything productive to the conversation, except that this is the first time in my life I've lost sleep over a rather elaborate sand castle.

This comic seems to be utilizing a javascript object called EventSource, while not a standard (yet) it seems to be supported on FF and Chrome, but according to the Mozilla Dev Network IE doesn't support it.

EventSource allows the server to push update events to the client thru ajax... an example of how it works can be seen by clicking on this URL:

At the time of this reply the following is what comes back:id: d089cb56-9622-11e2-8001-1c6f659cb250event: comic/timedata: {"spread":5,"image":"125364a4d8c1544bf5234a3ea76bb9f09cb3ee397b60931f7b17f272a82712f2.png"}

but notice how long the response seems to take to come back... this gives the server time to push out new events, which are then fired off in javascript thru event listeners. I would imagine when this connection dies the javascript for the comic fires up another one, but alas the minified JS is a pain to read!

Long post short, there's no guessing the image names, nor a way to trick the server into giving out past/future links... since it all originates from the server...

Aubron wrote:Alright guys! Bit the bullet and went ahead and automated http://xkcd.aubronwood.com proper. Should update five after the hour and 35 after, with a double check at :15 and :45 in case of server hiccups.

Good night all, and thanks to everyone who's sent me feedback and thanks via my website.

PS: If it breaks, figure out what comic it was supposed to throw up there, and PM me the link for when I wake up and scold it.

Wow. Okay so the auto updater survived the night flawlessly. Everything went better than expected. I just added keyboard controls for frame step and play/pause.

Aubron wrote:Alright guys! Bit the bullet and went ahead and automated http://xkcd.aubronwood.com proper. Should update five after the hour and 35 after, with a double check at :15 and :45 in case of server hiccups.

Good night all, and thanks to everyone who's sent me feedback and thanks via my website.

PS: If it breaks, figure out what comic it was supposed to throw up there, and PM me the link for when I wake up and scold it.

Wow. Okay so the auto updater survived the night flawlessly. Everything went better than expected. I just added keyboard controls for frame step and play/pause.

Very nice. I prefer this method of viewing to the gif. Hopefully your hard work will be rewarded with at least a few more days of animation to track! I'd be pretty unsurprised if the animation sequence ended up looping, so I hope you have a plan in place for if we end up back at image 1!

Was it ever concluded whether there were images in the sequence between frame 13 & 14 or frame 18 & 19? The jumps there are far bigger than any of the others.

daef wrote:i guess the worst case would be randall creating a kickstarter-project for "animated shorts" as c&h just did...

...on the other hand...

...now i want him to do that...

I don't know whether you can really call this a short... It has the potential to be significantly longer than Wagner's Ring Cycle! I guess it depends on whether you measure art in terms of length or content.